Blindsight

Two months since sixty-five thousand alien objects clenched around the
Earth like a luminous fist, screaming to the heavens as the atmosphere
burned them to ash. Two months since that moment of brief, bright
surveillance by agents unknown.
Two months of silence, while a world holds its breath.
So who do you send to force introductions on an intelligence with
motives unknown, maybe unknowable? Who do you send to meet the alien
when the alien doesn't want to meet?
You send a linguist with
multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate,
sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced
with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound, so compromised
by grafts and splices he no longer feels his own flesh.